Last Sunday night, Alberto Del Rio made his shocking return to WWE at Hell in a Cell by answering John Cena's U.S. Open Challenge and cleanly defeating The Champ for the belt. The move was especially surprising as Alberto still held the AAA Mega Championship, the top title for Mexico's largest wrestling promotion, and he had already been announced for many AAA shows in November.
As we reported in our Tuesday rumor round-up, the expectation at the time was that WWE would allow Alberto to finish up his prior commitments with AAA and lose the AAA Mega Championship in the process. That's because Alberto wanted to leave AAA on good terms. Indeed, unlike Mysteziz (or Carístico, as he is now known) who failed to inform AAA's creative head Dorian Roldan that he was jumping ship to a rival promotion recently, Del Rio made sure to tell AAA management of his WWE return about 12-24 hours beforehand, so they weren't completely blindsided, and gave them the impression that he planned to make all his scheduled dates.
Obviously, that's before Vince McMahon had his say. Given that Alberto Del Rio has reportedly been given a $1.45 million per year guaranteed contract, we shouldn't be surprised that plans have changed. According to Dave Meltzer, Alberto is unlikely to fulfill most, if not all, of his AAA bookings due to conflicts with WWE events McMahon wants him to appear on.
Alberto Del Rio had been booked to appear on a AAA house show in Monterrey on Sunday Nov. 1st and their television tapings in Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juarez on Monday Nov. 2nd and Sunday Nov. 15th, respectively, amongst other dates in between.
However, WWE has since confirmed that Alberto will be working next week's Monday Night Raw and Smackdown television tapings in Denver and Colorado Springs, respectively, before working their entire ten day European tour and then having to travel to Greenville, SC, for another Raw taping.
So basically, it will be impossible for Alberto to appear on AAA's next two television tapings, because you can't be in two places at once. Although it's feasible that Alberto could work this Sunday's Monterrey house show, I'd be surprised if he did, as it would mean an extra day away from home before embarking on a gruelling cross-continent trip.
Thus, as Meltzer notes "at this point it appears AAA will be lucky to even get one date with him to drop their Mega heavyweight title."
As the cubsfan indicates, the person really to blame for AAA getting screwed over seems to be Alberto Del Rio, as apparently his WWE deal was agreed upon roughly five weeks ago and he had plenty of opportunities to drop the strap before his WWE comeback:
"The WON mentions AAA (Dorian) was told on 10/12 that Alberto was going back to WWE, but dismissed it as another rumor and had no plans to take the Mega title away from him this year. They also say Alberto had been telling people in "recent weeks" he was going back to WWE, but gave the impression it would be in January. Meltzer says one source says the deal was done in mid-September. If that’s correct, Alberto knew he was leaving, could’ve informed AAA and lost the title on Heroes Inmortales before people knew he was going, and decided not to."
Although an argument can be made that AAA is not really competition to WWE, as they don't have cable television in the U.S., that misses the point that WWE hardly owes AAA any favours. Just ten days after Alberto Del Rio was fired by WWE on Aug. 7th 2014, he made his AAA debut at Triplemanía XXII, flaunting the 90 day no-compete clause WWE was attempting to enforce at the time. Moreover, AAA initially marketed Alberto as a former WWE star who had been unfairly fired by the company over an incident where he was the victim of racism (Del Rio was let go by WWE after he had slapped Cody Barbierri, a social media manager that is no longer with WWE, really hard over a racist joke that he had made in catering at Del Rio's expense).
As of time of publication AAA has yet to publicly react to Alberto Del Rio being forced by WWE to pull out of his bookings for the company, although it is believed that their local promoters are still advertising him for those dates.